The first known writer to use it (certainly in any clear and developed way) was Aristotle, who argued that the natural progression of human beings was from the family via small communities to the polis.
The Dorians of Crete and Sparta seemed to mirror the family institution and organization in their form of government (see Plutarch's The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans — Lycurgus, p. 65).
This is a mistake; they think that the distinction between them is not a difference in kind, but a simple, numerical difference.” (Politics Bk I, §i)"The rule of a father over his children is royal, for he rules by virtue both of love and of the respect due to age, exercising a kind of royal power"[3]After discussing the various domestic relationships, he concludes: “mastership and statesmanship are not identical, nor are all forms of power the same, as some thinkers suppose.
Arius Didymus in Stobaeus, 1st century CE, writes: "A primary kind of association (politeia) is the legal union of a man and woman for begetting children and for sharing life."
This was later expanded to cover international relations (e.g. the emperor of China is treated as the older brother of the Korean king).
The American diplomat Edmund Roberts in his description of Canton City, which he visited in 1832, included a quote on this for which he gives no source, but it was subsequently include in latter 18th-century publications, again without a source:The sovereign of men, say they, "is heaven's son; nobles and statesmen are the sovereign's children; the people are the children of nobles and statesmen.
The people should never forget to cherish reverential thoughts towards the nobles and ministers of state, to obey and keep the laws; to excite no secret or open rebellion; then no great calamity will befall their persons.
As the father is “active and strong” and the child is “passive or weak”, the mother is the “median term between the two extremes of this continuous proportion”.
(Compare the teaching of Pope Leo XIII: 'Likewise the powers of fathers of families preserves expressly a certain image and form of the authority which is in God, from which all paternity in heaven and earth receives its name — Eph 3.15') The relationship between the King as 'father of the fatherland' and the people is one of mutual love.
A reviewer encapsulated Fraser's argument: Equating patriarchal family metaphor with government paternalism and imperialist protectionism, the chapter argues that such familial intimations, heightened by acute emotionalism and hints of a Western culture soiled by Eastern penetration, corresponded to and reflected a paternalistic government urge to protect the victimized Greeks, a thinly veiled justification for French colonial intervention in the Mediterranean.
[9] Such a model is not a recent addition to modern discourse; J. Vernon Jenson discussed “British Voices on the Eve of the American Revolution: Trapped by the Family Metaphor” in the Quarterly Journal of Speech 63 (1977), pp. 43–50.